In
2011, Adm. Eric Olson,
then-commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, reported that “al-Qaeda
version 1.0 is nearing its end.” But he added an ominous caveat: “I’m very
concerned about what al-Qaeda version 2.0 will be.”

Adm. Olson’s worries—seemingly ignored by a government and a
public eager to “turn
the page” on more than a decade of war—were
well-founded. After Orlando and San Bernardino, Brussels and Paris,
Mosul and Sinjar, we have
learned that al-Qaeda 2.0—better known as ISIS—is a more virulent, more vicious,
more violent version of al-Qaeda 1.0.

Poison Roots

In
the long shadow cast by 9/11, when Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network maimed
Manhattan and murdered 3,000 Americans, it’s difficult to believe that something
could be worse than al-Qaeda 1.0. But with American nightclubs and office
buildings awash in blood, with Europe under siege, with Christians and Yazidis targeted
for extermination, with the Pandora’s Box of chemical
warfarereopened, with the female populations of entire cities enslaved, here we are.

Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi used the rubble of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) as the building
blocks for a jihadist superpower in ISIS that controls more territory, has
broader appeal, fields more fighters, possesses more financial resources, kills
more mercilessly, and reaches deeper and further into the West than al-Qaeda 1.0
ever imagined.

Think
about it: al-Qaeda 1.0 was kicked out of Sudan, inhabited a tiny corner of
Afghanistan, had a relatively modest financial base, and fielded a small core
of deeply committed, mostly-Arab footsoldiers. By 2011, al-Qaeda 1.0 had been
whittled down to 3,000
operatives worldwide.

Today,
ISIS fields an army of 36,500 foreign fighters, including 6,600 from the U.S.
and other Western countries.
ISIS has a $56-million monthly
revenue stream, thanks to
extortion, drug trade and black-market oil sales. Even after two
years of U.S. airstrikes, ISIS still controls
some 20,000 square-miles of Iraq and Syria. Thirty-four militant groups from
around the world—from the Philippines to Uzbekistan to Nigeria—have pledged allegiance
to ISIS. The ISIS franchise in Libya, for instance, controls 200 miles of Mediterranean coastline and boasts
an army of 6,000 fighters, up from 1,000 two years ago.

ISIS
is responsible for perhaps 22,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and
Syria. ISIS has committed genocide against
Yazidis and Christians. And its henchmen have murdered at least 1,440 people in
90 terrorist attacks in 21 countries outside Iraq and Syria, including massacres
in San Bernardino and Orlando. The FBI has 900 active investigations into
ISIS-inspired operatives in all 50 states.

Add
it all up, and ISIS is “more powerful now than al-Qaeda was on 9/11,” according
to Rep. Peter King, chairman of a House counterterrorism committee. Brett
McGurk, the president’s envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, calls ISIS
“worse than al-Qaeda.” Yet it’s important to remember that ISIS did not emerge
out of thin air. Its roots can be traced to al-Qaeda in Iraq. As The Financial Times has reported, the
remnants of AQI “morphed into the earliest version of ISIS.”

Off the MatAs
the surge took hold and turned the tide in Iraq—eviscerating AQI, persuading
former insurgents to become part of the solution, and rescuing Iraq from civil
war and America from defeat—most observers thought Washington and Baghdad would
renew the status of forces of agreement (SOFA) authorizing a residual U.S.
presence in Iraq. As Vice President Joe Biden said, “I’ll bet you my vice
presidency Maliki [then Iraqi prime minister] will extend the SOFA.”

By
every metric, post-surge Iraq was in better shape than pre-surge Iraq, and the Pentagonconsensus was that Iraq
needed the U.S. military’s support to sustain the
upward trajectory of the surge, to keep Maliki honest, to keep an eye on Iran
and to keep a lid on jihadist flare-ups. Frederick Kagan, one of the
architects of the surge, explained that “Painstaking staff work in Iraq led
Gen. Lloyd Austin to recommend trying to keep more than 20,000 troops in Iraq
after the end of 2011.” Before leaving his post as Joint Chiefs Chairman, Adm.
Mike Mullen urged the
White House to keep at least 16,000 troops in Iraq as an insurance policy to
protect the hard-earned gains of the surge. Then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates
and Gen. James Mattis (CENTCOM commander) concurred. “None of us recommended
that we completely withdraw from Iraq,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, Adm. Mullen’s
successor, later noted.

But
President Obama always viewed U.S. involvement in Iraq as a problem to be
corrected, rather than a commitment to be sustained. As former Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta laments, the Obama White
House was “so eager to rid itself of Iraq that it was willing to withdraw
rather than lock in arrangements that would preserve our influence and
interests.”

Thus,
President Obama demanded that the new SOFA be blessed by the Iraqi parliament,
rather than simply signed by the Iraqi government, and made it clear he was
willing to withdraw all U.S. forces by the end
of 2011—a timetable set by the Bush administration, albeit with an important caveat. The Bush
administration viewed those out-year
plans as “aspirational goals” dependent
on Iraq’s security needs. When Maliki balked at Washington’s stipulations,
as Kagan reported, the administration went forward with the zero option
“despite the fact that no military commander supported the notion that such a
course of action could secure U.S. interests.”

There
was nothing surprising about President Obama’s eagerness to bring America’s war
in Iraq to a close. (He opposed the war, and his
position reflected the national mood. Unlike 2003, when the American people and
Congress supported regime change in Iraq, there was little public support to
stay in Iraq in 2011.) Nor was there anything surprising about the
results:

·
In
October 2011, Col. Salam Khaled of the Iraqi army warned, “Our forces are good but not
to a sufficient degree that allows them to face external and internal
challenges alone.”

·
In January 2012, Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan worried, “Without all the enablers we provide, there’s no doubt there will be
less capability than there is right now,” adding
that if Iraqi troops prove unable to put pressure on jihadist groups,
“they could regenerate.”

·
In February 2014,
McGurk told a House committee that ISIS
operations “are calculated, coordinated and
part of a strategic campaign…to cause the
collapse of the Iraqi state and carve out a zone of governing control in
western regions of Iraq and Syria.”

ISIS thrived
on the symbiotic chaos in Iraq and Syria, using the unchecked
Syrian civil war as feedstock for its rise. “We had al-Qaeda down on the 10-count,
and we let it off the mat,” Col. Peter Mansoor observed as ISIS took root. By
2014, al-Qaeda 2.0 had supplanted al-Qaeda 1.0.

GamblesIt’s no coincidence that al-Qaeda 2.0 blossomed as the American people turned
inward, as Washington limited the reach and role and resources of the U.S.
military, as policymakers from both parties concluded it was time to “focus on
nation-building here at home” and “build
some bridges here at home ” and “build our own nation,” as the U.S.
pulled back from its forward presence overseas. But don’t take my word for it.

“The
moment they cease to be fought against,” former British Prime Minister Tony
Blair said of our jihadist enemies, “they grow.” Noting that Washington’s
“inaction” carried “profound risks and costs for our national security,” former
CIA director David Petraeus called Syria “a geopolitical Chernobyl spewing
instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world.” Former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington’s failure to intervene early
in Syria “left a big vacuum which
the jihadists have now filled.” Seemingly using the press to signal his boss,
Secretary of State John Kerry warned, “We cannot allow a hangover from the
excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of
isolationism,” adding, “Fatigue does not absolve
us of our responsibility.”

President Obama sensed this war fatigue among the American
people; thus the withdrawal from Iraq. But just as it was a gamble for President
Bush to launch the war and then the surge, it was a gamble for President Obama to withdraw
from Iraq. With
ISIS laying siege to Iraq and Americans fighting and dying there yet again, it’s safe to say that gamble didn’t
pay off.

President Obama has often noted that he “was
elected to end wars, not start them.” But in unilaterally trying to end the wars of
9/11,
the president ignored a fundamental truth of human conflict: The enemy gets a
vote. As Gen. Mattis explains, “No war is over until the enemy
says it’s over.” And our enemy is far from vanquished.

On the AttackIt’s been said thedifference between al-Qaeda
and ISIS is that “al Qaeda recruited on the basis of the defensive slogan of
martyrdom, ‘Islam is under attack.’ But ISIS is recruiting on the basis of
‘Islam is on the attack.’”

This message
emanating from al-Qaeda 2.0 radicalizes, galvanizes and inspires in a way that
al-Qaeda 1.0 did not. To counter it, Baghdadi and his henchmen must be
destroyed.

To achieve that
end—to achieve peace—we have to defeat the enemy that started this war. That
means equipping America’s military with the tools necessary to win (U.S.
defense spending tumbled from 4.7 percent of GDP in 2010 to 3.1 percent of GDP
by 2015); unshackling America’s military
to do what it’s made to do; seeking and sustaining political support for what our
troops call “the long war”; and leveling with the American people about the
enemy. As Gen. Michael Flynn, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012
to 2014, has argued, “We have to energize every element of national
power—similar to the effort during World War II or
during the Cold War—to effectively resource what will likely be a multigenerational
struggle.”

The president
soothingly says our enemy is “on the path to defeat” and “contained.” Yet ISIS
controls 20,000 square-miles of prime real estate in the heart of the Middle
East. There are more terrorist safe
havenstoday than at any time in history. The Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than at any time since 2001. ISIS is striking the West at
will. The bipartisan gamble known as sequestration is decimating the U.S.
military. And Congress has failed to debate or authorize the war against ISIS.
Can anyone seriously say Washington is heeding Gen. Flynn’s counsel?